DeGeneres: CBS Show 'Fell In Between,' Probably Won't Return
(Zap2it.com, 25. April 2002)LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Ellen DeGeneres knows her sitcom, "The Ellen Show," has little chance of gaining a second season on CBS. But she has few regrets about jumping back into network TV.
"I thought it was a show that had a lot of potential, and it was hard because it kind of fell in-between," DeGeneres says in an interview with Gay.com coinciding with the fifth anniversary of her coming out, both in real life and on the ABC show "Ellen."
"I think that my fans expected something a little bit edgier and hipper" than what "The Ellen Show" turned out to be, she says. "Yet it was a show on a Friday night on CBS that had to appeal to a certain audience. Also, it was very important for me to come back and have it specifically not be about me being gay."
CBS pulled the show from the schedule earlier this year, and DeGeneres says she's "99.9 percent" sure it won't be back, adding "I have some stuff that I'm working on that I'll do if it doesn't."
That could include hosting a daytime talk show. DeGeneres has had talks with Telepictures, which produces "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," about creating a talk show, which would likely premiere in fall 2003. She's also hitting the road again with her stand-up act.
DeGeneres was generally pleased with the "Ellen Show" episodes did make it on the air, but she concedes that the material was sometimes "hit and miss."
"I don't think we had enough preparation time," she says. "It should have been thought out a little bit more, but I thought that idea was good about me being a guidance counselor and living at home again. But it was a first-year show. If we would have come back, who knows. It could have become a great show."
CBS will announce its fall 2002 schedule on Wednesday, May 15
Ellen: No theme, just laughs
By Marques G. Harper
(Times Leader, 10. Mai 2002)On a spring morning in Los Angeles, actress-comedian Ellen DeGeneres watched old tapes of her previous comedy tours and tried to rid herself of any last-minute jitters before opening night.
"I'm just hanging out," she said. "Doing some work for tonight" - the April 15 start of DeGeneres' comedy tour, her first in two years. "It's just amazing. I just don't remember a lot of my old stuff. I haven't done it in so long."
Moments later she said: "I love doing stand-up. I love being on stage. It's an immediate response and an energy exchange that you don't get when you do movies."
Hitting the road for a spring tour, DeGeneres started off performing at a club in Hollywood last month. Since then she has crossed the country performing in cities such as Boston, Pittsburgh and Toronto. That's all before she'll make her way back west. In June, she'll end the tour in San Francisco.
Her new comedy act doesn't have a theme, she said. Instead she is using old material and discussing how we need to slow everything down.
"We need to simplify," DeGeneres said in a recent telephone interview. "There are just too many choices. Whether it be you can get 500 channels because you have a satellite dish verses when I was growing up there were three channels. Everything just keeps getting faster and faster and more immediate."
And that's why, she added, "we're just hurting each other. I think it bleeds into relationships. Relationships don't last as long as they used to last because nobody knows what it's like to go through anything anymore. We're just so used to being pampered."
Five years after publicly coming out as a lesbian, DeGeneres, who grew up in New Orleans, is still the kind of girl you could take home to your mom and breathe a sigh of relief. Your mom immediately would love her and invite her to stay for meatloaf and mashed potatoes. After all, DeGeneres doesn't use computers and doesn't have a Web site. She writes everything in a notebook. She still gets invited to host major award shows such as the Emmys and upcoming VH1 Divas Las Vegas concert. And more important, she's still funny.
DeGeneres said she has moved on from the media fuss that surrounded her life in the past few years and has grown as a performer and a person.
"I'm in a totally different place than I was five years ago when I came out," she said. "I don't think being gay has hurt my career. It's not like I was playing, you know, sex pots and leading ladies before and suddenly I'm not playing them. My humor before I came out was always the same kind of humor.
"My personal life being so public definitely hurt my career," she added. "And I think that's something that I learned from."
DeGeneres, who's in a relationship, said she hasn't spoken to former flame Anne Heche since the couple broke up in 2000. Since then, Heche, whose son was born in March, wrote a memoir called "Call Me Crazy" and married cameraman Coley Laffoon, son of a Knight Ridder executive. Knight Ridder is the parent company of the Times Leader.
Although she found success as a stand-up comic, starting off in New Orleans, DeGeneres, 44, is best known for her work in television. In the mid-1990s, she played bookstore owner Ellen Morgan, the first starring character to come out on a network sitcom, in ABC's hit "Ellen," a show originally called "These Friends of Mine."
Conservatives blasted DeGeneres for coming out, but the rest of the country settled in to watch the April 30, 1997, coming-out episode. Despite the audience-drawing "Puppy Episode," for which DeGeneres won an Emmy Award for writing, and ensuing stream of celebrity guests, the show was canceled.
That same year, DeGeneres, who was picked as Entertainment Weekly's No. 1 entertainer of the year, became a Time magazine cover girl. The words "Yep, I'm gay," the magazine's headline, ushered in a new era for gay characters and actors on television: Being gay was suddenly cool.
Now five years later, gay characters and actors and gay-oriented shows are mainstream. MTV and Showtime are racing to create a gay-oriented cable channel. Meanwhile, the list of shows with leading gay characters includes "Will & Grace," "Six Feet Under" and "Queer as Folk."
And in recent weeks, talk-show queen Rosie O'Donnell came out to a near yawn from the public compared with when DeGeneres came out. O'Donnell came out to raise awareness about a law in Florida that prevents gay couples from adopting children.
"I think it's great that" being gay on TV is "not a big deal anymore," DeGeneres said. "It shouldn't be a big deal."
DeGeneres, whose latest TV venture, "The Ellen Show," likely won't be picked up again by CBS, will follow O'Donnell and others who have ventured into the daytime market. In fall 2003, DeGeneres will host a talk show. It will be produced by a division of AOL Time Warner that produces O'Donnell's show, which is ending this summer after a successful run.
Coming out has "taken me on a different journey," DeGeneres said. "I had a choice to stay in the safe bubble of Hollywood. Everybody knew I was gay, and I didn't need to come out. I didn't have to do it. By doing that, it has taken me down a different path that my life would not have gone.
"I'm just a comedian," she said. "I got here because I'm talented and I'm smart and I'm funny. And just because I'm gay didn't erase that."
And by going forward, DeGeneres is doing what she knows best: making people laugh.
(Reprinted without permission)
The Ellen show will hit new and old formats
By Ed Condran
(NorthJersey.com, Juni 2002)So, who's the new gal on Ellen DeGeneres' arm? She isn't saying - and that's just one of the things the sitcom star is doing differently these days.
Her next objective: separating "sitcom" from "star."
Of her new deal for a daily syndicated talk-variety show expected to debut in fall 2003, DeGeneres says in a call from Los Angeles, "I need to do something different."
The new show, however, is contingent on what happens to her "old" show, which CBS is expected to make clear May 15. "The Ellen Show," in which DeGeneres played an L.A. dot-com entrepreneur turned guidance counselor, was yanked after seven episodes.
"I don't think the network is going to hold me to the show. ... I doubt they would hold me to a show they seem to have little interest in. Apparently this is something that didn't work out, and that's all right. I'm not letting things like this bother me."
That's a change from her first sitcom, "Ellen," when she took the good and the bad personally.
"I was just a different person then, experiencing many things for the first time," she said.
DeGeneres, 44, and her brother, Vance, who is part of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," grew up Christian Scientists.
"It was quite the childhood," she said. "We were part of this conservative, boring family living in New Orleans." Her parents divorced when she was 13.
After a semester at the University of New Orleans, she attempted stand-up.
"It was a great time to be in this business," DeGeneres said. "I was part of the comedy wave of the Eighties. There were clubs everywhere. I had a great deal of success, and before I knew it, I was on 'Open House.' Then there was 'Ellen,' and I was having the time of my life."
Well, not so fast. After playing a dotty receptionist on Fox's "Open House" in 1989, DeGeneres landed a small role on ABC's short-lived sitcom "Laurie Hill." That role led to the bigger one, carrying the ABC 1994 spring series "These Friends of Mine," which returned in the fall as "Ellen."
The sitcom showcased DeGeneres' Lucille Ball-esque comedy chops - "a perfect vehicle for me" - and was a great success.
"I loved being loved," DeGeneres said. "It was an incredible experience. I could never have imagined such an experience when I was growing up."
But the dating issue on "Ellen" proved sticky.
"ABC didn't know what to do about that," she said. "They knew I was gay. I wasn't out as a lesbian yet. I wasn't going to do a dating show. My character wasn't going to be searching for a husband. What bothered me was that these shows are 22 minutes long. Can't we go 22 minutes without having to deal with sex?"
Then, in 1997, DeGeneres decided to try to make sex work for her. That season, the most-watched episode in the sitcom's history aired - and "Ellen," and Ellen, were out.
"Everybody watched that episode, and we won Emmys for it, but things got weird after that," DeGeneres said. "ABC stopped promoting the show like it once did. An advisory ran before the show. Some people said that the show was too gay, which is like saying 'Friends' is too straight. Back then, I was outraged by it all. But now I can look at it with some perspective. It was shocking and new for people, but it still bothered me a great deal."
While the episode sealed "Ellen's" fate, it was subsequently upstaged by DeGeneres' highly publicized relationship with actress Anne Heche.
"Our relationship was so public it was too public," DeGeneres said. "I could feel people looking at me like, 'We don't like her anymore,' and it hurt. I went from being about as likable as you could be to being loathed."
How much different would DeGeneres' life have been if she had opted for privacy?
"That's the big question," DeGeneres said. "It's like 'It's a Wonderful Life.' What if I didn't go to that party [where she met Heche]? Life is a bunch of what ifs."
DeGeneres says she still can't make sense of her relationship with Heche, which ended in an equally well-documented break in August 2000.
"With the exception of her, I'm friends with everyone I've been with, but I don't know who she really is," DeGeneres said. "She walked out the door and I haven't spoken to her since. I'll never have closure with her, I'm sure. All I can do is pick up the pieces. I'll never make sense of it."
Meanwhile, DeGeneres is in a new, private relationship - and ready to make people laugh again.
"Stand-up has always been a great deal of fun for me," she said. "It'll be fun to get out on the road again and work in some new material along with some old favorites.
"I'm in a really good place right now."
(Reprinted without permission)